


Choose You Twice

by grapehyasynth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (mentions of only), Angst, Canon Insert, F/M, season 5, so many feels, trigger warning: Will Daniels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 07:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14327889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: Anon asked for "You are my first choice". The Doctor's influence in Fitz's mind makes him say some things that Jemma fears. She sets him straight.





	Choose You Twice

Jemma is starting to understand their mannerisms. She can discern, at just a glance, whether the man she meets today is more Fitz or more the shadow inside him.

It’s when she can’t that she feels most terrified. When she doesn’t know who is in control. When she looks at Fitz’s face and isn’t sure she recognizes him.

What kind of wife is she, to not recognize her own husband?

Today is one of those days. She feels like an imposter, sitting across the table from him, making idle conversation as if things are normal. As if his life-long flirtation with depression and self-loathing hasn’t taken a precipitous dive into something she can’t begin to comprehend.

He’s fiddling with his ring. That, too, makes her nervous. He only does that when he’s brooding on their relationship. She married a man she knew. And now a part of him is a stranger. A part of him doesn’t want to be married to her. At least that’s what she thinks – he’s never said as much. Until now.

“It’s funny, this time loop we’re stuck in,” he murmurs, fingers slipping soundlessly over the gold band. “Makes you think about things.”

“Like the future?” she ventures hopefully.

He shrugs. He doesn’t look at her much these days. When he does, it burns. When he does, she seems him pleading with her to help him. “I s’pose. But the past too. What could’ve been.”

Sometimes she’s afraid to be alone with him. Not because of what he’d do – he’d never hurt her, and she knows the Doctor won’t either, so long as he remains a whisper in Fitz’s ear. No, she fears what he’ll say when there’s no one else there.

“Do you ever think about what it would’ve been like?” There’s that burning look. His eyes are drowned in unshed tears. It’s like Fitz wants to cry and the Doctor won’t let him. “If Will had lived?”

Whatever she’s been dreading, that’s not it. Her hand curls on the table, nails digging into her palm. “I – I don’t understand.”

He tilts his head sadly, his sardonic smile an echo of the Doctor. “I know, Jemma. I know I wasn’t your first choice. I know if he’d lived it’d have been him you married, not me.”

Jemma feels like her chest caves in. She scrambles back from the table so fast the chair falls over. “How can you – how can you _possibly_ –”

His face pinches. It’s that tension, that way he tries to make himself smaller, the way he trembles a little even as he just sits there, that she knows it’s Fitz speaking, the shattered, miserable, scared part of him that’s always been there but which seems suddenly indomitable.

She wishes he’d hold a gun to her head again. She thinks she could bear that pain more bravely.

“I’m glad it turned out this way, of course,” he presses on. “Can’t deny that I’m selfishly glad. But – I’m sure you think about it. How can you not? You had something great, you’d have had lovely babies--”

“How dare you,” she whispers. She knows he’s not thinking straight. She knows he can’t help it. But after everything – after their _wedding_ – “How dare you presume to know what I feel. Not my first choice?” She stalks towards him and he recoils, she hates that she makes him do that but the Doctor, this illness, it’s killing the one good thing in her life and she cannot stand for it. “ _Not my first choice?_ Why do you think I got with Will to begin with? Because the man I loved, really, truly, deeply loved, the man I’d been sure I’d spend the rest of my life with, was gone, for all I knew forever. Because I lost _everything_ and Will was there! What kind of choice is that?”

“What kind of choice is it to be stuck with someone for ten years and just stumble into love with them?” Fitz shoots back.

“So you think that was an accident?” She’s not sure which fear is making her cry the more, that he doesn’t love her or that he doesn’t believe in her love for him. “You think I stayed by your side and worked with you and dragged you on the team and fought for you and with you and cried over you because I figured, well, this is the best I’m going to get, might as well just give in to it?” She drops to her knees before him with the weight of all their unspoken doubts heavy in her gut. “Fitz,” she whispers, and she has to dodge his hand as he tries to cradle her face, because she’s not done being pissed and sad and scared. “I have been choosing you every day since I met you. I choose you every minute. I didn’t stop choosing you when I loved Will. I didn’t stop loving you when I loved him.”

She grabs his hand, the one with the wedding ring, and squeezes it so she can feel the metal biting into both of their hands. “You are _it_ for me,” she pleads, because it is a plea, because she needs him to believe this, because a vain, naïve, desperate part of her wants to think that if he feels secure in her love he can beat this darkness in his mind. “It’s been _for better or for worse_ for far longer than we’ve been married. And if there were one thing I could change about our wedding, it wouldn’t be whom I married. It’d be the part where you said you don’t deserve me.”

“I don’t,” Fitz sighs, even as he clings to her hand and to her every word.

“But you _do_ —”

“Will was perfect—”

“Only because you were looking for things he was that you weren’t.” He looks up at her, a bit startled, and her heart flutters with hope. “You looked at him and you picked out all the bits of him that weren’t like you and thought, well, that must mean I’m not good enough. But when _I_ look at _you,_ I don’t compare you to Will. I look at you and I see the man who mumbles in his sleep and never forgets my birthday and who helped Daisy when the rest of us were too bigoted and who still believes in Nessie and whose gaze turns me to jelly. It’s never been a contest, Fitz. No one else compares.”

His face crumples and he leans into his hands, crying. She touches her forehead to his, combing the hair over his ear.

“So please stop saying you don’t deserve me,” she murmurs against his cheek, kissing his tears, the salt burning her lips only reminding her that he is still alive, still soft, still breaking. “Because it makes me think you don’t believe in my love. And there is nothing in this universe I am more sure of – not Newton’s laws, not the mitochondria, not even the value of a solid classification system – than my love for you.”

His lips tremble an inch from hers, but instead of a kiss, it is a hug he draws her into it, the kind of be-my-anchor hug they’ve exchanged for years. In some ways, Jemma thinks, as Fitz sinks onto the ground to kneel with her as they hold each other, it’s more significant than any of the kisses they’ve shared, because this hug, this manner of hugging, came first.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Jemma, I know you love me but I can’t – I’m not –”

“I know,” she assures him, rubbing up and down his spine.

“I’m d-different now,” he gulps. “You shouldn’t love me anymore.”

She pulls back and takes his face firmly in her hands. He looks a bit like a chastened child, sniffing, blinking blearily up at her. He looks like a boy who needs his mum. “If you had cancer, would you expect me to give up on you? Of course not. You’re still the man I love. You’re just sick. But you’ll get better. We’ll get you help. We’ll fix this.”

He closes his eyes. She can see him warring with the Doctor. “What if we can’t?”

She doesn’t tell him that’s what she thinks about, when she lays awake at night, unable to sleep. A future in which his mental health continues to deteriorate. In which he disappears into the Doctor. In which the cardigans and the hand tremor and the soft smiles and the childish pranks disappear too. In which he stops speaking to her with affection and takes off the wedding band and leaves her forever.

She doesn’t tell him that.

She cradles his head to her chest like she can protect him.

“I left you once, thinking it would help you,” she answers at last, telling the bit of truth she can voice without feeling sick. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

 

 

_You said ‘If we had one more life_

_I’d be spending it by your side’_

_Kissed me one last time_

_You said ‘Baby I’d choose you twice’_

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely think we should be centering experiences of mental health and not just the people around mentally ill people, but I also imagine Fitz is borderline suicidal right now and I can't write that. So I hope you understand why I wrote from Jemma's POV.


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